Maddy’s mother continuously played the Beatle’s White Album that year and it echoed all over the house and even in Maddy’s room where she’d go to get away from her mother’s latest boyfriend or
Uncle as her mother told her to call him with his droopy moustaches and cigarette-yellowed fingers and once she was hidden away from him either under the bed or in the cupboard behind the clothes
she could hear him singing with her mother the lyrics from the Album and once she was sure he’d not return looking for her she’d come out and lay on the bed and smoke a cigarette she bummed from
her mother’s bag after sorting through the junk and woman things she had stuffed in there and laying on the bed she'd watch smoke rings from the cigarette rise up to the ceiling and then glide
along the off-white and as she lay there she thought of her daddy and the last time she saw him in the hospital thin and burnt out and with those hollow eyes trying to smile at her and trying to
mutter words which got stuck in his throat and his hand stretched out towards her that seemed like the hand of one dead and she held onto that vision of him and she inhaled deeply on the cigarette
listening at the same time to the voices of her mother and the other prat singing still downstairs somewhere he trying to get into her panties and her mother too stoned to care either way if he did
or not and she recalled the time one of her mother’s boyfriends grabbed her from behind and kissed her neck with his wet lips and put his hands around her waist and squeezed her and all the time
laughing and making lewd suggestions and her mother when she told her said oh men are like that Maddy you’ll find out one day that’s how they are and never did jackshit to help her about things or
tell her why the hell she bled from between her legs one night and she thought she was dying and ran into her mother’s room and said Mamma I’m bleeding to death and I’m dying and her mother poked
her head from beneath the bed sheets and said oh that’s just a woman thing Baby just grab a towel for now and we'll sort it in the morning now go Honey I’m busy right now with Henry here and her
boyfriend pushed his head out of the sheets and stared at her and off she ran crying and slamming the door behind her and since then she managed her own things and knew things she never knew before
and exhaling the smoke she wished her daddy hadn’t died and was there with her and telling her how much he loved her and would tell her stories of his young days with his rock band and make her
laugh as he used to before he got ill and he and mother were together and seemingly happy and she wondered what he would think of her mother’s boyfriends what he would make of the drugs and booze
and things and the things the prat downstairs tried to do to her when her mother was too smashed out of her mind to know or hear or care and all the time she felt and sensed her daddy was listening
and watching and invisible waiting there.